QuoteReplyTopic: Thoughts on Band Camp (bandcamp) Posted: November 05 2013 at 14:18

Hello Prog Archives,

I was wondering about people's thoughts on Band Camp. Similarly to myself, I imagine many here stand as advocates of physical music. But since Digital music and streaming is flourishing more than ever before, I am curious about what services that are out there that allow artists to see more income out of it.

I have written this recent article in my blog about Band Camp being a digital service that is moving digital music forward, making music sales digitally more beneficial for the artist as well as the fans.

I love bandcamp! It gives my band their own website and lets us sell our music on there site without a monthly charge. They will take some out of each purchase of the song but its better than paying iTunes $90 and get less than half out of every purchase. Plus i can customize my page and it can show up on the bandcamp homepage if enough people buy our music! Plus its the best possible way to get our music out without a record deal.

Some of my yearly Top 10 albums come from this amazing website. Great website. Anyone who hasn't tried to use it, I suggest devoting an hour or two and end up with a dozen albums or bands you're in love with.

I love bandcamp! It gives my band their own website and lets us sell our music on there site without a monthly charge. They will take some out of each purchase of the song but its better than paying iTunes $90 and get less than half out of every purchase. Plus i can customize my page and it can show up on the bandcamp homepage if enough people buy our music! Plus its the best possible way to get our music out without a record deal.

That's great to see you utilising it so well! A question I however may wish to ask is how to do you encourage your fans to pay via bandcamp instead of somewhere else, say Itunes? Writing the aforementioned blog on my part my help but any ideas on how to promote your music via that page more effectively?

I love bandcamp! It gives my band their own website and lets us sell our music on there site without a monthly charge. They will take some out of each purchase of the song but its better than paying iTunes $90 and get less than half out of every purchase. Plus i can customize my page and it can show up on the bandcamp homepage if enough people buy our music! Plus its the best possible way to get our music out without a record deal.

That's great to see you utilising it so well! A question I however may wish to ask is how to do you encourage your fans to pay via bandcamp instead of somewhere else, say Itunes? Writing the aforementioned blog on my part my help but any ideas on how to promote your music via that page more effectively?

I use bandcamp and many artists I admire and/or artists I know use it, too. I think it's incredible. I'm able to put all my stuff in one place, organize it, and in the future, sell it. I'm sure I wouldn't be able to get the amount of success I have (which isn't very much, but i digress) if all I had was, like, Mediafire and the like.

I love bandcamp! It gives my band their own website and lets us sell our music on there site without a monthly charge. They will take some out of each purchase of the song but its better than paying iTunes $90 and get less than half out of every purchase. Plus i can customize my page and it can show up on the bandcamp homepage if enough people buy our music! Plus its the best possible way to get our music out without a record deal.

That's great to see you utilising it so well! A question I however may wish to ask is how to do you encourage your fans to pay via bandcamp instead of somewhere else, say Itunes? Writing the aforementioned blog on my part my help but any ideas on how to promote your music via that page more effectively?

I don't know how to promote more effectively on bandcamp unless you already have fans and you use particular tags and you become the top seller in extremely common tags. This is kind of the beauty of bandcamp as it forces you to advertise elsewhere.

We use Bandcamp to share our music with the world for free. Not because
it has no value but because we are well aware that it has limited appeal
to a select few. We don't know who they are so it's available to
everyone. Funny thing is somehow someone out there downloaded it and
distributed it to numerous download sites around the world, mostly in
Russia by the looks of it. A couple of them are charging for the
downloads which I find humorous because it's available for free on about
a dozen websites thanks to the pirates. So yes, in a way we're being
ripped off but I seriously doubt any real money is being made with our
esoteric musings.

I
don't really promote it because I don't think that works. People have a
completely different reaction to music when their attention is alerted
to it via solicitation than when they find it on their own. Instead I
try to put subtle hints here
and there.

I really
like the stats they give you. You can see where your traffic is coming
from. I'm really pleased to see how much of it comes from
progarchives.com.

Ryan - I just read the blog you linked here - very good. I've never seen
that nifty "Modern Recording" illustration, despite its viral status. I
know it's a popular opinion but personally I think it's a
misconception. There was true audiophile equipment back in the day, but
nobody I knew had it. It was astronomically expensive.

Really
smart scientists tried to silence tape hiss with Dolby A B and C,
followed by DBX 1 and DBX 2, none of which were compatible with each
other and all of which sucked the life out of any good recording. For
the most part I had crappy cheap stereos with rumbly turntables tethered
to cassette decks with misaligned heads. I remember listening to tapes
in my car, wedging a comb under the tape forcing it to align with the
head. If I was lucky it would play all the way through without getting
eaten. There's precision for ya. So anyone honest coming from that world
will tell you that a 256kbps mp3 played through decent mid-priced
headphones, even cheap headphones, sounds a hell of a lot better than
that.

Back to the topic of Bandcamp - I gave my opinion of it as a
DIY artist. I can't really say much about it as a listener. I was
blessed to be born in 1960, so my age of discovery landed in the heyday
of Prog. If I was in my early teens now I can only imagine what it would
be like to have the discovery tools at my fingertips. I'd probably be
searching every corner of Bandcamp for mysterious treasures. In the
'70's we had some late night TV and radio shows and a few magazines and
the Prog they presented was sparsely dispersed along with Helen Reddy
and The Carpenters.

Bandcamp is great. I love the way they leave it up to you and don't pester you about anything, like reverberation does. You get to decide how much to charge and it's easy to embed their player on your web site!

I spent about 5 hours fishing for overlooked pearls on bandcamp just yesterday, ended up finding 3 albums that I really liked and had a good laugh on insane amount of pure trash that is up there, too. I really love the conception of this website, as it is very easy to find something interesting, the streaming is decent and distribution options are really impressive. Plus, and that's very important it gives enough options to customize visual appearance. What else would I want really? A contrary, I really don't like reverbnation for its constant annoying offers for paid promotion which is completely useless for an artist and only serves the purpose of filling the pocket of Reverbnation's owners. In general, I think we live in the golden age of music: if you have time and enough in your mind and in your hands you can create or find any music, regardless of what guys with big bellies in their offices want to sell you.

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